Panda3D
Panda3D is open source and, as of May 28, 2008, free software under the revised BSD licence. Releases prior to May 28, 2008 are not considered free software due to certain errors in the design of the old Panda3D license. Despite this, these older releases of Panda3D can also be used for both free and commercial game development at no financial cost. Panda3D's intended game-development language is Python. The engine itself is written in C++, and utilises an automatic wrapper-generator to expose the complete functionality of the engine in a Python interface. This approach gives a developer the advantages of Python development, such as rapid development and advanced memory management, but keeps the performance of a compiled language in the engine core. For instance, the engine is integrated with Python's garbage collector, and engine structures are automatically managed. A developer using Panda3D typically writes code in Python, but it is also possible to directly access the engine using C++ code. The users of Panda3D include the developers of several large commercial games, a few free software projects, and a number of university courses that leverage Panda3D's short learning curve. The community is small but active. Questions on the forum are generally answered quickly. |Features = Panda3D Features List |History = The Disney VR studio is a branch of Disney that was created to build 3D attractions for Disney theme parks. They built an attraction called "Aladdin's Magic Carpet", and the engine they created for that was eventually to become Panda3D. The engine in its current form bears little resemblance to those early years. Over time, Panda3D was used for additional VR rides at Disney theme parks, and was eventually used in the creation of Toontown Online, an online game set in a cartoon world, and later for their second MMORPG, Pirates of the Caribbean Online. In 2002, the engine was released as open source. According to the authors, this was so that they "could more easily work with universities on Virtual Reality research projects." However, it took some time for Panda3D to take off as an open source project. From the article: The system, although quite usable by the team that developed it, was not quite "open source ready." There were several interested users, but building and installing the system was incredibly complex, and there was little in the way of documentation or sample code, so there was no significant open source community right away. However, the open sourcing of the engine allowed Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center to join in the development of the engine. While Disney engineers continued to do the bulk of the development, the Carnegie Mellon team built a role for itself polishing the engine for public consumption, writing documentation, and adding certain high-end features such as shaders. Panda3D's name was once an acronym: "Platform Agnostic Networked Display Architecture." However, since that phrase has largely lost its meaning, the word "Panda3D" is rarely thought of as an acronym anymore. |Tutorials = Panda3D comes with a number of sample programs as well as an introductory Hello World tutorial in the manual. |Games list = Here is a partial list of commercial non-free software products that utilise Panda3D: * Disney's Toontown * Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean Online * SimOps Studios: Code3D * MSA's Thermal Enforcer * Little Mermaid Pinball, Aladdin Pinball, and Pirates Pinball Here is an incomplete list of free software projects building on Panda3D: * Angels Fall First: Second Antarean War * La Granja de Los Poderosos * Funtrench's Eden |External links = * Panda3D home site * Devmaster.net listing of Panda3D }} References